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Originally Posted by gmw
(Added emphasis mine.) That was my reaction. Same, too, for the fish feeding an implied multitude and that multitude not being worthy of it. (This thought shortly after "The fish is my friend too [...] But I must kill him." That Santiago kept telling us how much he loved the fish made me think of that line from The Princess Bride: "I do not think it means what you think it means."  ) |
The line about loving what you kill seems to me to be a pretty common literary trope; I'd guess it's how people justified the indefensible. I'm reminded of a quote by Isak Dinesen that I couldn't track down, something along the lines of, "To see a lion and not want to kill it...." Of course that was entirely indefensible, unlike a peasant fisherman who fishes to live.
And in one of those synchronicities, it was Dinesen who Hemingway said should have won the Nobel instead of him.